Complete OCD presentation

This is my complete presentation on OCD, including clinical characteristics, issues with classification and diagnosis, explanations and therapies. it also contains a section (in white font) at the start which acts as an introduction to psychopathology. The AO1 and AO2 should be fairly clearly distinguishable. Hope it's helpful!

Slides in this set

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Classification anddiagnosis Abnormality is a difficult concept to define. One of the problems is trying to decide where normal behaviour stops and abnormal behaviour takes over. Clinicians and researchers working in the field of psychopathology have developed classification systems to help them make an accurate diagnosis. Classification ­ the act of distributing things into classes or categories of the same type. Diagnosis ­ the recognition and identification of a disease or condition by its: Signs ­ the results of objective tests, such as those from blood or urine tests. Symptoms ­ these are reports from the patients about how they feel.…read more

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Classifying and diagnosing mental disorders Classification is central to scientific disciplines. It is used in psychopathology for a variety of reasons: To make communication between professionals working within the field of psychopathology easier. To understand the implications of diagnosis for predicting the outcome of the disorder and for choosing appropriate treatment. To understand more about the possible causes of mental disorders. To indicate possible preventative measures. To stimulate research and to make the research more reliable. Psychiatric classification raises particular controversies and challenges which are not the same for other scientific disciplines, including other branches of medicine. Mental disorders, for example, differ from physical disorders in several ways: One major difference is that the underlying cause of the problem is usually apparent in physical illnesses. Clinicians are more dependent on the patients' accounts of their symptoms. However, with the arrival of modern brain scanning techniques such as PET and MRI, more signs are now available to those working in the field of psychological disorder. Another difference is that there is less agreement about what actually constitutes illness with regard to mental disorders as opposed to physical disorders. For example, no one would disagree with the conclusion that someone having a heart attack is ill and needs treatment. However, there is less agreement about whether someone who is in a sad and depressed mood should be classified as `mentally ill' and in need of treatment. There are two major classification systems used in the field of psychology. These are called the International Classification System for Diseases (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)…read more

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Evaluation While most professionals working in the field of psychopathology acknowledge the usefulness of classification and diagnosis, some people think it is inappropriate in the context of psychological abnormality: Some people have challenged the whole idea of treating mental disorder in the same way as physical disorder. Thomas Szasz (1962), for example, dismissed this approach as `the myth of mental illness'. He believed that it encourages us to interpret the problems of living as if they are illnesses. As a consequence, we remove all responsibility from individuals for solving their own problems and we run the risk of administering inappropriate, even damaging, treatments. Some critics say that placing a patient in a diagnostic category distracts from understanding that person as a unique human being with an individual set of difficulties. This can lead to stigma whereby an individual with a mental illness is wrongly judged as dangerous, unpredictable, incurable etc.…read more